Delmarva Public Radio - No Way Out?

Listeners on the Delmarva Peninsula are upset.
Delmarva Public Radio part of our identity
Tom Hehman: Even if SU throws in the towel, we will not

Keep Delmarva in Delmarva Public Radio

As the published letters in the links suggests, listeners are going to miss their local public radio station.

Saving the stations, current local programming won't be easy.

Is it feasible to expect the kind of support it is going to take from listeners to keep WSCL and WSDL from switching formats to national music services? The stations lost money 17 out of the last 21 years. Listener support, foundation support and underwriting continually fell short of fiscal needs. In the past, the university made up the difference. The Salisbury University Foundation responsible for Delmarva Public Radio hired Public Radio Capital (PRC) to assess the station's fiscal viability. The University, coping with a shrinking budget, is looking for places to save.

The suggestion by PRC is that DPR drop news programming and most local classical programming. Public Radio Capital reported that too much of Delmarva Public Radio's audience was being siphoned off by stations in DC and Baltimore. Reduced audience results in diminished support.   The suggestion is to replace the NPR news station with a AAA format. Most of the programming would be syndicated. The classical service would also lose most of its local content and be programmed by a service like Classical 24.

The Numbers Matter
Size isn't everything but, public radio stations need a large enough core audience to draw from to sustain itself. WSCL and WSDL's numbers don't offer alot of hope for listeners to save their stations. In order for residents of Delmarva to save their stations their stations they will need to step forward in numbers that exceed the usual membership benchmarks. The simple benchmark is that ten percent of a station's cume can be expected to contribute. WSCL's cume 12+ was about 18,000 in Fall 2011. WSDL's cume was about 13,000 in the same period.   A rough estimate of potential givers is 3,100. DPR's annual budget is about $1million. According to the station's website about 50% of their budget is covered by memberships. To cover the $500,000 the average pledge needs to be $161. To cover the $220,000 projected deficit the average pledge will need to increase $71.

Simply taking 10% of the cume to make projections doesn't really cover the issue. Specifically, the station needs to look at the size of the core audience and the core's loyalty to the station. Drawing on the core is a much smaller sample to draw on for funding. Simply put, DPR's audience might not be large enough to support itself. Without support from other sources the stations will continue to run deficits as currently programmed.